Lack of hemodynamic interaction between CGRP-receptor antagonist telcagepant (MK-0974) and sumatriptan: results from a randomized study in patients with migraine.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Sumatriptan in the context of migraine.

The objective of this article is to assess the effects of sumatriptan monotherapy, telcagepant monotherapy, and their combination on blood pressure (BP) in migraine patients during a headache-free period.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 24 patients taking part.

The age groups tagged for this paper are young adults, adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover study.

Because people in this Sumatriptan study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the patients nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Sumatriptan, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Sumatriptan group a baseline to be compared against.

In the crossover set-up each of the patients took both Sumatriptan and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

Individual time-weighted averages in mean arterial pressure (MAP) were evaluated using a linear mixed-effects model.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Analgesics, Azepines, Blood Pressure, Calcitonin Gene-Related Peptide Receptor Antagonists, Drug Interactions, Hemodynamics and Imidazoles.

Author keywords: CGRP receptor antagonist, Triptan, migraine, sumatriptan and telcagepant.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Sumatriptan in 24 patients in people with migraine.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Its findings take up roughly 5 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2013 (Cephalalgia : an international journal of headache), a journal based in England.

More context: Migraine research.